Archive for January, 2011

In an article that makes you roll your eyes and wonder ?where do they find these people?? the BBC interviews Dr Spencer Wells, explorer-in-residence at the National Geohraphic Society and in charge of their Genographic project, about his new book Pandora?s Seed

Dr Wells tells them about the claims he makes in the book:

In the book, I talk about global warming and overpopulation. I trace a lot of these issues back in time to the dawn of the Neolithic. This was a period when humanity made a sea change in its culture. We settled down and started growing our own food.

The first edition of New Scientist (UK) of 2011 has a review of 2010 and a preview of 2011 section?

?and they are rather optimistic that the world has finally moved on from the climategate emails.

Those Cursed Climate emails ? New Scientist Jan 1, 2011

Thousands of them were hacked off the servers of the University of East Anglia, home to one of the UK?s leading research units, in November 2009. In 2010, their content was dissected, re-dissected, and then dissected some more, amid claims that some climate scientists had engaged in fraudulent behaviour. Four independent reviews exonerated them, and datasets were made public that were previously under lock and key. And finally, the world moved on.?

This would just appear to be the time-honoured PR strategy ?Nothing to be seen here, move along please? and an attempt at controlling a message. So there is to be no optimism from New Scientist that the world could now be safe from Thermageddon (NS October 2010). (more…)

If you were to also take a brief look at it?s global warming, climate change and climate skeptic section it will become quite clear what the contributors thoughts are about ?climate skeptics?. After browsing for a while I then considered:

President Obama’s comments on Wednesday in a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, misinformed the public about potential changes in foreign exchange rates and their effects on U.S. citizens. Obama on Wednesday said that he would like to see the Chinese yuan appreciate faster in value. While Hu indicated that China is committed to allowing the free market to better dictate the value of the yuan, Obama said China is implementing their steps to allow the yuan to appreciate “not as fast as we’d like.”

For years, the U.S. has been criticizing China by calling them “currency manipulators”. The fact is, the Federal Reserve is the real currency manipulator because their actions will soon lead to a U.S. Hyperinflationary Great Depression that destroys the lives of all Americans who aren’t prepared for life with a worthless U.S. dollar. All China is doing is pegging the yuan to the U.S. dollar so that their product manufacturers and exporters can maintain some level of stability. However, the U.S. is using this as an excuse to explain its rapidly deteriorating export market. (more…)

In an interview broadcast on The Nation?s website Professor Chomsky has stated that democratic elections and the election of sceptical representative posed ?a danger to the survival of the species?.

The latest democratic elections were a disaster, according to Chomsky, because the stupid, irresponsible masses had elected Republicans who were sceptical of global warming. For this, the media had to share some of the blame, as they sometimes allowed dissenting voices to be heard, which the professor obviously thinks is a terrible crime. It only confuses people when they hear two sides to a story.

He pointed, in particular, to an article by the New York Times which covered the fact that most meteorologists didn?t believe in the theory of man-made global warming. This is meaningless, according to Chomsky, because meteorologists were just ?pretty faces that present the weather forecast? and didn?t know anything about climate (it wasn?t clear if he included meteorologists such as Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth in that sweeping condemnation). (more…)

The European carbon market has been thrown into turmoil after the scandal-hit scheme was suspended for a week over suspicions of fraud.

More than ?2bn (£1.7bn) of trade is likely to be disrupted after the European Commission said it would prevent transactions until January 26.

The suspension follows allegations that 475,000 carbon credits worth ?7m were stolen in a hacking attack on the Czech carbon register. It appears that the intangible allowances were bounced between eastern European countries before disappearing without a trace.

France’s Bluenext exchange was the first to close its platform, while Austria, Poland, Estonia and Greece also shut their registries for trade. (more…)

The doom-sayers are becoming more fashionable just as experts are coming to the view it has all been one giant false alarm.

The human appetite for bad news knows no bounds. That is why gossip is usually malicious and why, on a grander scale, prophets of doom are always guaranteed a credulous audience. Conversely, good news ? however well attested ? is generally squeezed in the margins of newspapers.

For example, The Independent buried in a few paragraphs a story with the headline “Population growth not a threat, say engineers”. But at least The Independent found some space to cover the publication of a report last week by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers entitled Population: One Planet, Too Many People? ? I could find nothing about it in other newspapers.

The reason for that distinct lack of column inches is that the institution answered its own question in the negative. No, there are not (and will never be) too many people for the planet to feed. As the report’s lead author, Dr Tim Fox, pointed out, its verdict is not based on speculative guesses about the development of new agricultural processes as yet unknown: “We can meet the challenge of feeding a planet of 9 billion people through the application of existing technologies”. For example, Dr Fox pointed out, in Africa, no less than half the food produced is destroyed before it reaches its local marketplace: with refrigeration and good roads, the developing world could avoid this horrendous waste. (more…)

Bill Gates has read the tea leaves, and thinks that there is money in advanced oil exploration technologies.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is tossing his financial support behind a Houston company which hopes to utilize detailed analytics and measurement technologies to take some of the guesswork out of onshore oil and gas exploration. NEOS GeoSolutions — whose investors include the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and investment bank Goldman Sachs — today announced a $60 million investment from Gates and others. (more…)

CTV is Canada?s ?largest private broadcaster.? Yesterday afternoon it published a news story on its website titled Climate change to spur crop shortages, study claims. The story begins with this sentence (bold added by me):

The world may be 2.4 degrees warmer by the end of this decade, and that could have deadly consequences for global food production, according to a new study overseen by Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Osvaldo Canziani.

Further down in the article, in case we missed it the first time, we?re reminded:

Canziani, a Nobel laureate and former co-chair of the IPCC, oversaw the report.

What the unidentified journalists who wrote this news story didn?t make clear is that Canziani is not a Nobel laureate in the normal sense of that term. He is a recipient of the Peace Prize by virtue of the fact that he worked on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. His Nobel is the exact same Nobel that was awarded to Al Gore. (more…)

Radical green James Hansen pushes Chinese war on American economy

Imagine if a former military officer, a traditional-values conservative now an attache at the State Department, wrote for a largely foreign audience to urge an international boycott of U.S. goods. The aim was to ruin the American economy to protest the new policy of allowing open homosexuality in the armed forces. Media outlets and politicians would be screaming for his dismissal. Free speech is one thing, but nobody on the taxpayer dole in a position of responsibility would be allowed to call for the destruction of our economy. One way or another, the man would be forced out.

Now consider James E. Hansen, director of the taxpayer-funded NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Last week, blogger Marc Morano discovered a Nov. 24 blog post by Mr. Hansen calling on China to lead an international effort to impose fees on carbon-dioxide emissions, then lead the World Trade Organization to allow import fees on goods from any county – with the U.S. being the target – without such fees. The goal would be to punish America, causing “continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being,” until the “fossil-money- ‘democracy'” no longer “rules the roost in Washington.”Mr. Hansen also praised communist Chinese leadership for “tak[ing] the long view … in contrast to the West with its [lamentably] short election cycles.” (more…)

EurekAlert! carried a study with unfounded global warming claims that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020

An online news service sponsored by the world’s premier scientific association unwittingly promoted a study making the false claim that catastrophic global warming would occur within nine years, the Guardian has learned.

Last May, a frightened teenager was trapped inside his home when a mob of SEIU astro-turfing thugs (estimated at 500 strong) trespassed on his front lawn to protest to intimidate his father, the deputy general counsel of the Bank of America. While the protesters caught the family by surprise (allegedly aided and abetted by the police), unbeknownst to them, Fortune?s Nina Easton was a neighbor to the victim and exposed the injustice for what it was.

Now, though, another gang of astro-turfing thugs has targeted (yes, targeted) the private home of a real estate developer for the audacity of building a WalMart that will employ up to 1200 DC-area residents.

With unemployment in Washington, DC at 10.2%, it is hard to imagine anyone not wanting to see jobs added. That is, unless that someone is a union that doesn?t like the fact that WalMart operates its U.S. stores union-free. (more…)

I would like to take as my text the following quote from the recent paper (PDF, 270k also on web here) by Dr. Kevin Trenberth:

Given that global warming is ?unequivocal?, to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence [on the climate].

The ?null hypothesis? in science is the condition that would result if what you are trying to establish is not true. For example, if your hypothesis is that air pressure affects plant growth rates, the null hypothesis is that air pressure has no effect on plant growth rates. Once you have both hypotheses, then you can see which hypothesis is supported by the evidence.(more…)

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, no doubt still aglow from his latest victory in his war on health care reform, got some help this month from an outside nonprofit in his quest to pry loose a bevy of documents related to former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann.

On January 6, the American Tradition Institute (ATI), along with state Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), presented UVA with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking essentially the same information Cuccinelli demanded last year in a civil subpoena: e-mails Mann sent to and received from 39 scientists and all of his assistants; all documents generated by five specified grants; and Mann?s computer algorithms, programs and source code. (more…)

Sourece: http://www.atinstitute.org/blog_post/show/63
The Environmental Law Center at American Tradition Institute today noted with regret a press conference scheduled for this morning by three Virginia lawmakers to announce their effort to protect the University of Virginia from compliance with an anti-fraud against the taxpayer statute. This law was passed unanimously in the state’s two legislative chambers just three years ago with full knowledge that it covered the academic class, which is uniquely dependent upon taxpayer dollars.

This move is transparently designed to substitute for the University’s faltering legal defense against Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in his pre-investigation of possible fraud involving millions of dollars. It also heightens the importance of ATI’s recent, pending request <http://www.atinstitute.org/blog_post/show/58> for the same records sought by Mr. Cuccinelli, which thanks to his inquiry, the University no longer denies possessing, but only refuses to produce. (more…)